Books

William H. Graves: El Gran Reto de la Educación: Equidad | Logro Académico | Rendición de CuentasThis 2013 publication is a compilation of my major papers from 2005-2012 translated into the Spanish Language. I'm indebted to my colleague, Joaquin Huerta, for his effort and kindness in conceiving and completing this project on behalf of our clients and colleagues in the Spanish-speaking world.

Larry Downes and Chunka Mui: Unleashing the Killer AppEconomics Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase observed in the 1930s that that organizations were growing in size and, thus, becoming more bureaucratic, all because there was too much friction in externally acquiring the services and products necessary to the provision of an organization's core products and/or services. Downes and Mui make a persuasive case that the Internet changes that internally focused paradigm by removing the friction from external sourcing, thus enabling new "leaner, meaner" operational models in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Downes' and Mui's "killer app" is Thomas Friedman's set of "flattenting" forces. (*****)

May 11, 2014

Global social progress depends more and more on education. The meaning of my assertion is captured more urgently in H. G. Wells quip from 1920: "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Education is now running a lax race against catastrophe, in spite of the urgency implied by a recent international "social progress index." I will elaborate both points.

Reading more about the organization and its work reveals that SPI 2014 neither includes economic indices (such as GDP) nor ranks indices and nations on a zero-sum competitive basis. Instead the Index is a framework of social indices and nations' rankings designed to help advance humanity's progress, especially for every human in every participating nation. One of the organized charts from the data table of the SPI 2014 reveals that the United States ranks 16 in the overall aggregated macro-level index while being, among these cited component indices, at the index rank of 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge, 23 in Access to Information and Communications, 22 in Personal Rights, 15 in Personal Freedom and Choice, and 13 in Tolerance and Inclusion, yet nevertheless ranked first in Access to Advanced Education! These few indices and others not identified here can be useful in thinking about education's role in social progress in the U.S. and elsewhere. Perhaps my work over recent years can also be useful.

My long-standing career in and around education remains committed to social progress that can be derived from education. I'm pleased to be full-time with Ellucian and also active with the a) Board of Governors of Antioch University, b) Board of Directors of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, and c) Board of Vistors of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill (where I was a math professor and, at various points during a 30-year career, also a senior IT officer and an academic officer). I respect and owe much to these organizations but will not assume to represent their opinions on various positives and negatives that I describe here for education's role in social progress.

Incremental evolution within traditional education is unlikely to advance social progress, as will be suggested below by multiple problems amidst education's lax racing against catastrophe in the U.S. and some other nations. Some of the revelations below also touch upon how to revolutionize and synchronize educating and learning as a common-good purpose for advancing global social progress.

Is "Access to Advanced Education" truly affordable today? Washington Post Opinion Writer Katrina vanden Heuvel published on April 22 (2014) her thinking about "Elizabeth Warren' s needed call for student loan reform." Senator Warren is attempting to resolve today's student debt crisis of $1.08 trillion, which is twice as much as in 2007 and now exceeding total credit card debt.

Do SPI's Personal Rights and Personal Freedom and Choice require revolutionary attention and changes? Yes, according to Elizabeth's Dwoskin on April 21 (2014) writing for the Wall Street Journal that a "Student Data Company to Shut Down Over Privacy Concerns." InBloom is the nonprofit company selected and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to control data that should instead be under the control of each learner and the rights and responsibilities that the learner has relative to various interactions and negotiations with educational, political, and other entities.

In contrast to the "shut down" of InBloom is the growing success of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS), which is the most accomplished and economically viable IT standards organization for interoperability among the applications and data systems used in education. A 2013 IMS project discussion touched on the nascent concepts of "educational positioning system" (EPS) standards and an early EPS-like application developed by Michael Mathews, Lone Star College, and a few other partners. The Global Positioning System (GPS) provides a thoughtful metaphor for the "Educational Positioning System" and its need to "flip" control of a learner's educational data and artifacts from the InBloom system to the learner's private control and personal rights available under an EPS application. While the EPS is transparent as a concept, it is complex as a potential system of IMS standards that would have to be tackled by collaborating IMS Contributing Member education institutions, education suppliers, governments, and others.

When requested and supported by its Contributing Members, IMS helps develop and compliance-certify an increasing number of interoperability standards that can be adopted in order to forego often hidden integration time and costs among educational applications and data. "A New Architecture for Learning" was recently published in the EDUCAUSE Review by Rob Abel (IMS CEO) and IMS leaders Malcolm Brown and Jack Suess. Standards and architectures in many cases can enable major social progress initiatives that rely on education. For example, IMS QTI/APIP standards are critical to IT-delivered learning evaluations and assessments, including those under development for the Common Core State Standards Initiative in the U.S. The Common Core is developing core mathematics competency evaluations that can lead to advancing environmental, economic, and other forms of social progress. A number of states, including NC where I live, are on the verge of withdrawing from the social progress goals of the Common Core. This bodes poorly for the already distressed SPI 2014 U.S. rank of 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge. A similar mistake originated at state levels in the heyday of developing "no child left behind" when most states insisted on non-comparable proprietary assessments.

Zakaria and Porter discussed their surprise and dismay not only on SPI 2014 U.S. rank at 39 in Access to Basic Knowledge, but also to the rank at 23 in Access to Information and Communication. These ranks are not overly surprising for two reasons:

The Robert's Supreme Court in the U.S. often rejects social progress viabilities, which are seldom favored by more than four reliably progressive Justices. For example, a recent decision implying diminishing Access to Advanced Education was reported in "Supreme Court Upholds Michigan Affirmative Action Ban," which explains the Court's 6-to-2 decision of April 22 (2014).

The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit, nongovernmental, global, open economic governance organization for the Internet. ISOC's social progress vision is that "the Internet is for everyone," unlike the Court's decision to uphold Michigan's affirmative action ban on college admissions. In spite of the exponential growth of Internet-enabled services and businesses, many nations and educating organizations have not yet enabled a model of Access to Advanced Education that can use the Internet and the IMS standards to scale up affordable learning opportunities and credentials for every human and for humanity.

Scaling up education to affordable learning opportunities and successful credentialing for all is core to improving the learning progress indices analyzed by the Social Progress Imperative. Consider this related progressive abstract: "Education is being economically squeezed in a Holy Grail pursuit of educational justice and attainment at scale. Together, IMS standards-based mash-ups and an Internet-like governance model for the credentialing economy can improve flexibility and affordability for all beneficiaries." The quoted abstract frames my recent EDUCAUSE Review Online publication, "The Credentialing Economy: Transformed by and for Its Benefciaries," which accordingly defines "Education Leadership Commons" (ELC) to be an economic governance organization for the credentialing economy. The ELC model is akin to the ISOC economic governance model. ISOC and ElC also have similar economic governance characteristics that should be applied to common-good natural resources, as researched and recommended by Elinor Ostrom, who thereby became a 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics before passing away in 2012. An ELC start-up work could be inclusive of the IMS, the Social Progress Imperative, various foundations such as Gates and Lumina, educational organizations, learners and their families, governments, suppliers, and employers. All would have to become open and agreeable to balancing economic rights and responsibilities mutually to their individual benefits and to the benefits of social progress that depends on educating and learning. The ELC start-up team would have to agree to design and sustain a long-term ELC financial model, which might have a parallel in ISOC. The .org domain managed by the nonprofit Public Interest Registry is a long-term source of funding for ISOC and therefore for many core ISOC affiliate members, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and others. Two IMS-standards related projects could help think through a possible funding partnership for SPI, ELC, and IMS. One project could ask the IMS QTI/APIP Alliance to help develop the delivery of core learning readiness evaluations as evidence of Access to Basic Knowledge at various levels of accomplishment and cross-walks among independent learning readiness providers. CHEA leaders might also be interested in this project for evaluating critical thinking and basic fluency skills for learners. A second, less mature project could architect EPS standards that could help IMS Contributing Members pursue applications that would "flip" control of a learner's educational data and artifacts from the InBloom-like system to the learner's private control and personal rights consistent with improving upon SPI 2014 education-related indices. Meanwhile, some challenges in scaling up social progress to educating and learnng together are below. To include more than U.S. problems in scaling up, a few references are from the social progress theme "Rethinking Education: Shaping the Future" covered in the International Finance Corporation's 6th International Private Education Conference in 2014.

Scale up educational attainment to increase the percentage of tertiary-credentialed learners among various adult populations.

The tertiary-credentialed learners among U.S. adults at least 25 years of age have been near 40% for almost 40 years, suggesting that educating has been stagnant relative to the need for learning from inside traditional education.

The Lumina Foundation focuses includes a core tag line on every Lumina web page: “to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality college degrees, certificates or other credentials to 60% by 2025.” The Gates Foundation is similarly committed. President Obama and the Department of Education have similar attainment scaling goals. According to Inside Higher Education's Doug Lederman, “First in the World” will be administered by FIPSE as a $75 million grant program focused on educational attainment and finally announced on May 15 (2014), and the new attainment program will also address some of the goals of the President's August 2013 announced hope to “Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class."

Scaling up educating and learning together was a core story told by an IFC conference panel featuring four leaders from Latin America and India. President and CEO Pete Pizarro of Whitney International in Latin America, for example, spoke to 1) scaling up learners through one IT-integrated platform, 2) focusing on learner centricity (as opposed to faculty and institutional centricity), 3) developing regulatory innovation because Whitney International's private campuses have to be for-profit in some nations (Brazil, for example) and nonprofit in others (Argentina, for example).

Scale up educational justice by reacting to two critical factors:

The strong statistical correlation at almost 1.0 between the levels of family income and the levels of credentialing in the family has been documented around the modern world for some time, including the efforts of the Census Bureau in the U.S.

Families with middle to low incomes are an increasing proportion of the family population (in the US and also in many other countries).

The two factors together imply that scaling up educational attainment proportions will require credentialing a growing proportion of learners from family incomes on low to mid rungs of the economic ladder.

Scale up international financial sources to supply the various forms of grants and loans — especially micro-loans — that could become subject to the ELC economic governace of the credentialing economy as part of social progress to advance and sustain humanity’s environmental, social, economic, and educational justice.

Scale up new forms of “educating” to start increasing 1) educational attainment that has been stagnant for about 40 years in the U.S. and 2) educational justice that has moved in the wrong direction in the U.S. partially as the result of higher education student loans currently in debt by more than $1.08 trillion that is greater than total credit card debt.

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World is the latest publication (2012) by Tony Wagner (Expert in Residence at Harvard), who keynoted the IFC conference on “Rethinking Education: Shaping the Future." He quipped that education needs to focus on creative and timely learning, not on educating as long practiced by traditional universities that now cannot meet the scale issue. He said that engaged, creative learners would benefit primarily from outlier faculty members and outlier executive leaders. Educational institutions in the US, for example, are managed and delivered by revenues based on credit hours or course hours, not on outlier faculty and executives interested in changing the old business models.

Bill Gates and at least ten or so other famous entrepreneurs dropped out of “prestigious” educational universities over the last few decades in the US.

The first paragraph of my paper on the "credentialing economy" (cited above) quotes that “education is the slowest form of learning,” according to media guru Tony Schwartz in the 1960s. Tony Wagner is trying today to disaggregate traditional educating and then redesign credentialing that can be scalable, flexible, and affordable to learners aiming at the professions and workforces researched and offered by educators helping to "pay learners forward" to assist humanity’s environmental, social, economic, and educational justice.

Scaling up the role of education in social progress is becoming neither affordable, accreditable, nor controllable by an increasing proportion of learners within the traditional practices of education. We need to synchronize educating and learning revolutions in order to advance social progress.

November 29, 2013

I was pleased to have my paper, "The Credentialing Economy: Transformed by and for Its Beneficiaries," published on December 6, 2013 in the 2013 November/December edition of the EDUCAUSE Review Online (ERO) and selected as an "Editors' Pick." Consider reading the paper if you're interested in how to scale up educational justice and educational attainment together, while also making credentialing more affordable to all private and public parties who benefit from the verifiable learning that leads to a credentials.

“President Obama outlined an ambitious new agenda to combat rising college costs and make college affordable for American families. His plan will measure college performance through a new ratings system so students and families have the information to select schools that provide the best value. And after this ratings system is well established, Congress can tie federal student aid to college performance so that students maximize their federal aid at institutions providing the best value. The President’s plan will also take down barriers that stand in the way of competition and innovation, particularly in the use of new technology, and shine a light on the most cutting-edge college practices for providing high value at low costs.”

“A higher education is the single most important investment students can make in their own futures. At the same time, it has never been more expensive. That’s why since taking office, President Obama has made historic investments in college affordability, increasing the maximum Pell Grant award for working and middle class families by more than $900, creating the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and enacting effective student loan reforms eliminating bank subsidies and making college more affordable.”

“However, despite these measures, college tuition keeps rising. The average tuition at a public four-year college has increased by more than 250 percent over the past three decades, while incomes for typical families grew by only 16 percent, according to College Board and Census data. Declining state funding has forced students to shoulder a bigger proportion of college costs; tuition has almost doubled as a share of public college revenues over the past 25 years from 25 percent to 47 percent. While a college education remains a worthwhile investment overall, the average borrower now graduates with over $26,000 in debt. Only 58 percent of full-time students who began college in 2004 earned a four-year degree within six years. Loan default rates are rising, and too many young adults are burdened with debt as they seek to start a family, buy a home, launch a business, or save for retirement.”

In my ERO paper, I suggest why and how we can work together to improve upon President Obama's plan.

Not that President Obama and Secretary Duncan need my approval, but I say “right on” to their advice for taking advantage of proven and emerging technologies and the innovation strategies they enable – course redesign, flipping classes, MOOCs, modular credentialing (“badges”), competency-based learning/credentialing, adaptive learning/testing, predictive analytics, and other actionable IT-enabled strategies for improving institutional and collective performance.

The President also requested $1 billion to fund a “Race to the Top for Higher Education” and $55 million to fund FIPSE’s “First In the World” (FITW) program aimed at increasing the proportion of adult populations holding a postsecondary credential. The FIPSE National Board endorsed FITW in 2012. As a member of that board, my intent in the ERO article is to offer constructive suggestions for improving upon the President’s plan in several dimensions, including how to meet the educational attainment goals of FITW.

Student financial aid is the President Obama's primary lever for making “college affordable for American families,” especially for those on the low-to-middle rungs of the economic ladder. Again, right on!

Higher education’s service model and its revenue-dependence on student financial aid (grants, tax credits, and loans) have become hot topics for education policy makers and, thus, also targets for programmatic grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates, Lumina, and other foundations, and from regional and national departments of education. For example, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2012 on Completions-Focused Financial Aid. The article described the Gates Foundation’s partnership with a research and advisory group, Washington, DC-based HCM Strategists. HCM is organizing and leading several different but related efforts to use financial-aid as a lever for improving credentialing processes and completion rates while serving a greater proportion of low-income students more productively – i.e., more affordably, not only to needy students, but also to the governments and institutions that support them financially as they earn credentials. With support from the Gates and Lumina foundations, HCM has guided and reported on a number of recent projects. HCM helped to develop (and now maintain) a website on College Productivity and also provide a newsletter and other resources addressing the productivity agenda. The titles of two HCM reports reveal the thrust of some recent work efforts: 1) Doing Better for More Students: Putting Student Outcomes at the Center of Federal Financial Aid, and 2) The American Dream 2.0: How FINANCIAL AID can help improve college access, affordability, and completion.

The American Dream 2.0 report was prepared on behalf of an “American Dream 2.0 Coalition.” The coalition’s agenda is strikingly similar to the agenda of the nonprofit, nongovernmental “Education Leadership Commons” (ELC) described in my ERO article and in the 2012 paper, “Is Education’s Past Its 2050 Prologue?” The paper draws on Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on the “economic governance of the commons,” as well as my earlier work. The idea is to “consumerize” the common-good credentialing economy by relying more and more on the multiplier efficiencies inherent in “shared services” – a sharable “mash up” of educational data and self-service apps enabled by IMS interoperability standards, along with sharable credentialing processes enabled by such mash ups. Perhaps the best high-tech metaphor for envisioning the credentialing economy as a consumer market is the Education and Career Positioning System that is analogous to the familiar GPS.

In spite of all of these recent initiatives, President Obama's underlying strategy is to 1) tie financial aid to institutional performance on a college “rating” system to be developed collaboratively uner the DoE, 2) challenge states to fund public colleges based on performance, and 3) hold colleges and students receiving financial aid responsible for time-based progress towards a degree. That three-fold strategy, in my opinion, would lead to increased and unnecessary regulation, which the plan itself eschews with its intent to “encourage innovation by stripping away unnecessary regulations.” I hope also that the implementation of the President’s new plan will emphasize needs-tested student grants over student loans. The Department of Education, after all, recently announced that outstanding student-loan debt now stands at $1.2 trillion, second in the consumer market only to mortgage debt. Higher education cannot become an entitlement, but should become a needs-tested right, for which the student also should assume some form of responsibility.

The recent White House initiative, the FITW plan, and many other policy initiatives call for increasing the rates of credentialing and attainment (the proportion of a population holding a postsecondary credential), while also making college more affordable. The “credentialing economy” thus becomes an apt phrase for referring to the education enterprise as an economy or market. The phrase “economic governance” is used in my ERO paper to describe a foundation for a strategy alternative to the President’s regulatory strategy. The economic-governance alternative strategy will attempt to balance economic rights and responsibilities among the students, families, educational institutions, governments, and other economic beneficiaries in the credentialing economy – thus explaining the phrase in the title my ERO paper, “education transformed by and for its economic beneficiaries.” In the closing sections of the ERO paper, I propose this alternative “economic governance strategy for the common-good credentialing economy” and explain it through analogy with the Internet Society (ISOC), Internet Engineering Task Force, (IETF), and their respective roles in the economic governance of the Internet, which continues to work “for everyone” – without regulation! If all people are created equal, shouldn’t education also be affordably and flexibly accessible to everyone and economically governed as openly and inclusively as possible under a set of trust-but-verify success metrics? Let’s pause to take a look at the Internet’s governance model.

We all know the remarkable story of the Internet – the “network of networks,” which today is a paradigm of open, global self-regulation. It is controlled by no one entity, but continues to race forward in response to the common-good interests of all of its economic beneficiaries. Through a Web browser connected to the Internet, the Web becomes a self-service access point for a wealth of resources and services, some free and some for a fee, some open and some by permission. The result has been exponential growth in new economic and social “wealth,” both private and public – the same spectacular results that the President hopes to achieve through his latest higher education policy initiative! Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO of ISOC, put it this way in a 2012 article on Internet governance: “The Internet works because its governance is open, inclusive, collaborative, and transparent.”

Right on, Lynn, that’s how we could govern the credentialing marketplace. Learning to do so will require schools and colleges to emphasize learning, rather than educating, and to expect leadership from, well, executive leaders, with some help from their CIOs and external investors in the credentialing economy, such as governments, employers, donors, for-profit suppliers to education, and nongovernmental nonprofit education-related organizations.

March 14, 2013

Many recent articles and conference speeches have analyzed the potential of the MOOC (massively open online course) to revolutionize learning – even disrupt the education establishment beyond recognition! MOOCs interest me because they are scalable by design and, therefore, might purposefully be used to help scale up educational attainment– the proportion of a population holding a trusted higher education credential. MOOCs are also an extension of the digital OER concept (open educational repository, open education resources, and so on). A MOOC is not only an open education resource, but also is typically “taught” and monitored by one or more expert instructors, and may even incorporate adaptive learning or other personalized learning strategies based on advances in cognitive science and immersive digital “learningware.”

Today’s “MOOC madness” reminds me of the introduction about 15 years ago of the CMS (course management system), or, as it is now more often labeled, LMS (learning management system). The CMS was then imagined to be revolutionary and game changing – even before it was integrated with the earlier ERP (enterprise resource planning) innovation. As its name at the time implied, the CMS has been removing friction from course management for some years now – and has been integrated with the ERP. The CMS also has extended online, anytime (asynchronous) formal education well beyond the scaling capacity of synchronous forms of organized "distance learning." The CMS, nevertheless, has not revolutionized the teaching, learning, and credentialing processes that, for the most part, remain tightly linked to revenues from courses and credit hours, which measure learning by time and process, not by learning outcomes.

The course and the credit hour are increasingly anachronistic. They are barriers, for example, to open, competency-based learning that could be independently credentialed through multiple credentialing channels. To its credit - no pun intended - the U.S. Department of Education recently announced its intent to incorporate competency-based credentialing into its financial aid programs.

By scalably modularizing learning competencies in expert domains, rather than enshrining courses, MOOCs might help spawn a scalable and open credentialing marketplace (SOCM) – but only if independent evaluations of learning competencies were to become readily available, exchangeable, and affordable to all the parties involved. Meanwhile, let’s shift the focus from MOOCs to the policy challenges that are threatening to disrupt higher education, with or without MOOCs.

Educational Attainment Challenge: Scale up and sustain the proportion of the population holding a trusted higher education credential.

As far back as 1920, H. G. Wells linked education policy to the global common good by warning that “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The pace of the race has quickened since 1920, and progressive policy makers are understandably disposed in 2013 to intervene in educational affairs because they want education to educate more people to higher levels as a strategy for avoiding catastrophe while scaling up and sustaining social, economic, and environmental justice.

Scaling up higher education attainment proportions will arguably remain the dominant thread in education policy worldwide for some time, and also must include a focus on scaling up scientific and technical expertise and the humanistic and civic habits of mind that nurture the mutual respect and cooperation so essential to addressing humanity’s grand challenges.

If progressive nations and their institutions of higher education are to honor the democratic principle that all people are created equal, then ensuring affordable access to successful learning experiences that lead to modular higher education credentials may be the best "equality" strategy. The population from the lower rungs of the economic ladder, however, is a significant proportion of population in most modern nations and is even trending upwards in many. Making education successful and affordable for this economic demographic is, thus, a necessary emphasis within the educational attainment challenge. Because metrics such as family income and net worth currently correlate directly with levels of educational credentialing, this is critical social justice challenge for progressive education policy makers.

Educational Justice Challenge: Admit and credential needs-tested students at a scale sufficient to reduce the proportion of the adult population standing on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Failure to pursue and achieve educational justice might be called educational poverty - in recognition that economic attainment and educational attainment correlate at the individual and aggregate levels. The loftiest goals of education and its "business models" are codependent! Costs and prices matter and are becoming mutually untenable!

Three-Way Unaffordability Conundrum: Neither potential enrollees from the lower rungs of the economic ladder nor the governments and institutions that have traditionally provided financial aid to them can afford to participate in today’s credentialing marketplace – which continues to rely on an inflationary revenue model based on credit hours attempted.

Progressive policy makers and higher education leaders must cooperate to decrease institutional per-credential operating expenses. Cooperation is the only rational strategy for resolving the unaffordability conundrum while pursuing educational justice and attainment in today’s credentialing marketplace, which cries out for increased credentialing productivity.

MOOCs re-enter the picture because they use technology to scale access to learning opportunities while driving down the affordability of access to those opportunities. MOOCs are far from a total solution at this point, but they can be incorporated into a more comprehensive high-tech/high-touch strategy for increasing credentialing productivity while also evolving towards a scalable and open credentialing marketplace (SOCM).

Reduce institutional per-credential operating expenses by scaling up a common set of online (asynchronous) academic and administrative self-services to all institutional stakeholders (with a design focus on post-traditional learners) and, where possible, by sharing the common set of self-services inter-institutionally with partner institutions.

Provide timely, personalized expert assistance, as needed by the individual (to overcome the limitations of self-service). Ensure that per-credential costs of these personalized high-touch services do not erode per-credential cost offsets from the shared self-services above.

A few observations will help clarify the comprehensiveness of the flex redesign strategy as a means to increase per-credential productivity on the path to improving educational justice and attainment in a more scalable and open credentialing marketplace (SOCM).

Most learners require help in the learning process, at both the level of specific content mastery and the integrative level of curriculum purpose and choice. Rather than offering such help mostly through one-size-fits-all classroom activities and limited office advising sessions, the flex strategy seeks to personalize expert assistance, as needed by the individual who is trying to move beyond the limitations of self-service in a timely manner

Online self-service reduces per-credential cost structures, especially when shared in common among multiple academic and administrative units – even among the constituent institutions in a system or other multi-institution consortium created to amplify efficiencies.

It is the purposeful attention to cost structures that distinguishes flex learning from blended learning. Both blend traditional and IT-enabled pedagogy, but blended learning does not necessarily seek to reduce per-credential expenses by maximizing online self-service.

The day is near when all stakeholders will expect academic/administrative resources, transactions, and support services to be available via self-service apps on mobile devices.

The high-enrollment course redesign strategy (pioneered by the National Center for Academic Transformation) can be used in tandem with the flex redesign strategy to increase academic value and further reduce institutional per-credential costs. MOOCs could play a role, not only by scaling enrollments, but also by parsing high-enrollment courses into team-taught modular components, each module linked to an independent evaluation of competencies learned.

The external sourcing/partnering redesign strategy popularized as “flattening forces” in Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” book also can be combined with the flex redesign strategy. Friedman labeled his eight technology-enabled strategies as out-sourcing, in-sourcing, open-sourcing, in-forming, supply-chaining, work-flowing, off-shoring, and steroid-ing, the latter referring to what today might be called mobile-ing. (The hyphens are my way of making Friedman’s forces actionable.) These models, especially when viewed as cloud-based models, can contribute further to the self-service per-credential cost offsets at the core of the flex strategy.

Too often invisible in the flex redesign process is the critical role that educational interoperability standards play in reducing total costs. IMS and PESC help develop and certify such standards in the world of higher education, and insistence on standards should be part of any redesign strategy.

During my academic career as a professor of mathematics, I was time and again delighted to learn that two seemingly disparate concepts were, in fact, logically equivalent. In the language of logic, “A if and only if B” means that statement A implies statement B and that statement B implies statement A. If one statement is found to be true or false, then the other is also, respectively, true or false. A and B are totally intertwined, one with the other.

Scaling up educational attainment and educational justice in tandem has become education’s intertwined grand challenge in Well’s race between education and catastrophe. Wells’ race to secure the global common good might be restated in 2013 as follows:

A modest edit of John Lennon's lament to Yoko Ono speaks to the grand challenge: "Lord, you know it ain't easy." Technology will continue to advance at an exponential pace that defies human comprehension, even as human ingenuity and higher learning make possible that pace. The technology-enabled flex redesign strategy, nevertheless, can immediately start amplifying education's role and effectiveness in resolving humanity’s grand challenge. Let’s therefore focus ever more purposefully on educational justice and attainment and their mutual affordability to all participants, even as “cloud” technologies empower the MOOC movement and catalyze future digital innovations yet to be comprehended and made available in the "learning cloud."

December 09, 2012

The International Association of Universities convened its 14th General Conference on November 27, 2012. The conference theme was "Higher Education and the Global Agenda: Alternative Pathways to the Future." My conference dinner presentation offered an “alternative pathway to the future.” I described the pathway as a global “movement” open to both educational institutions and their external investors (governments, students, donors, employers, and suppliers), and targeting the cooperation required to open up and expand the credentialing marketplace. The concept is elaborated in my recently published paper, "Is Education's Past Its 2050 Prologue?"

The 2050 purpose of education, from my perspective, is to help meet the challenges to humanity that are already driving policy pressures on education to credential more people to higher levels of learning attainment. For example, President Obama has called for scaling adult attainment proportions from 40% to 60% in ten years to increase the population of adults holding a trusted, postsecondary credential – a degree or certificate – from 80 million to over 120 million.

The USA is not alone in making educational attainment the dominant thread in education policy. Focusing attainment on increasing the pool of credentialed scientists and technologists and spreading the humanistic and civic habits of mind required to cooperate across geopolitical and socioeconomic boundaries is a worldwide strategy for addressing humanity’s grand challenge to advance and sustain social, environmental, and economic justice.

Is the attainment strategy working? Not so much. The global economy is sputtering here and there and threatening havoc everywhere. Global warming continues apace, while the green economy wavers. Too many people suffer from the ravages of war, hunger, and other cruel injustices. These challenges persist even as well-intentioned organizations, including the U.N., labor to meet humanity’s grand challenge by rebalancing rights and responsibilities among the economic beneficiaries of various common-good resources, such as clean water and air. Entrenched special interests, intentionally or not, can damage or destroy a common-good resource to the detriment of its other beneficiaries. Potential “tragedies of the commons” similarly lurk in the common-good credentialing marketplace, while attainment proportions in the US have been stuck at about 40% for over 30 years.

Credentialing rates and attainment proportions are currently stalled by a three-way affordability conundrum: how to make credentialing processes more affordable not only to the proportionately increasing economic demographic of low-income students, but also to the institutions and governments that financially support those students. Educational Justice is a fitting phrase for signifying the achievement of mutual affordability. Educational attainment and justice are co-dependent in today’s credentialing marketplace. Bureaucracy, high overhead costs, increasing per-credential cost structures, and shrinking public funding reveal today’s governments and credentialing institutions to be entrenched 20th-Century special interests, which are unwittingly impeding the expansion of educational justice and attainment to help meet humanity’s grand challenge.

In contrast, there are 21st-Century economic governance models for common-good resources that could be applied to the credentialing marketplace. Consider the Internet Society, which has successfully maintained the seminal principle that all Internet traffic will be created equal. Today’s Internet/Web continues to empower exponential growth in social and economic wealth – exactly what progressive policy leaders hope will result from scaling up educational justice and attainment, which are increasingly critical to the realization of the democratic principle that all people are created equal. That’s why I proposed in the aforementioned paper an Education Leadership Commons as an open, non-profit, nongovernmental economic governance organization for the credentialing marketplace.

The ELC offers a framework for a cooperative “movement” aimed at rebalancing rights and responsibilities among credential providers and their external investors in a shared marketplace. One idea would have governments commit to needs-tested financial aid (and/or a tax credit) in an amount projected annually from tax data. For students to remain eligible for such aid, they would have to submit at age 14 (or thereabouts), and periodically thereafter, to an age-appropriate evaluation of basic communication and critical thinking skills. Any institution accepting a student’s financial aid would be obligated to report predetermined, universal high-level accountability metrics. Government and other research centers would have access to the aggregated, privacy-secured data from the above protocols, and students would control their personal data. The paper includes a matrix of rights and responsibilities to shed light on the basic idea that earned, needs-tested financial aid and earned tax credits could become an economic lever for scaling and sustaining educational justice and attainment.

The credentialing marketplace is a common good that must be expanded and sustained, and the ELC is a global, open economic governance cooperative aimed at scaling up both educational attainment and educational justice to help meet humanity’s grand challenge to advance and sustain social, environmental,economic, and educational justice.

2. How and where are current dominant funding models steering higher education and research?

3. Is globalization setting a new agenda for internationalization of higher education?

First, I’ll answer IAU's questions immediately below. Then I'll provide a rationale for one "alternative path to the future" based on creating an open, nonprofit, nongovernmental economic governance organization for the credentialing marketplace: the global Education Leadership Commons. The purpose of the global ELC would be to scale up educational justice and educational attainment by opening up the credentialing marketplace, which would require realigning economic rights and responsibilities among credentialers and their external investors – students/families, governments, donors, employers, and suppliers.

1. Higher education has long addressed the challenges facing humanity, but not at the scale and in the timeframe now expected.

2. Today's dominant funding model compensates credit hours attempted, not credentials awarded, and is out of synch with humanity’s expanding need for higher learning at lower costs and greater returns to all invested beneficiaries. Credentialed higher learning will have to become more affordable to both the expanding economic demographic of low-and middle-income students and to the governments and institutions that help financially support them.

3. Higher education will be internationalized, not so much by institutions attracting students from abroad, building campuses abroad, and offering study-abroad programs, as by adapting the technology-enabled “flattening” models for partnering and externally sourcing described a few years ago in Thomas Friedman’s “flat-world” account of globalization. New cross-boundary partnerships will emerge among educational institutions, governments, nongovernmental organizations, employers, and commercial suppliers.

On November 28, my dinner presentation to conference attendees will address all three IAU themes in more depth by drawing on arguments from my 2012 paper, "Is Education's Past Its 2050 Prologue?" The paper was published in conjunction with the 80th anniversary celebration of the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science. The celebration concluded with an "Information Professionals 2050 Summit and Conference" on June 4-5, 2012. At the invitation of Dean Gary Marchionini, I wrote about and then discussed "education in 2050” during the June event.

Neither Dean Marchionini nor I would presume to predict the nature of education in 2050. We nevertheless agree that education is already under pressure to credential more people to higher levels of learning attainment. This pressure reflects the primary policy strategy in many modern nations for focusing education’s attention on preparing students to help advance and sustain social, economic, and environmental justice.

Many colleges and universities today still set their sights solely on becoming (or remaining) among the best in the world. Competition is desirable, but can be limiting at a time when humanity’s habitat and socioeconomic flash points evidence a collective need to focus higher education's attention on becoming best for the world – a phrase borrowed from Sister Candace Introcaso, president of La Roche College. That's why progressive policy leaders are asking educators to scale up educational attainment: the proportion of an adult population holding a trusted, postsecondary credential (degree or certificate). For example, President Obama's attainment goal is to scale up the attainment proportion from 40% to 60% in ten years, thereby enlarging the U.S. population of credentialed adults from around 80 million to over 120 million, a tall order. Many other countries have their own attainment proportion goals and timeframes.

Scaling up attainment proportions accordingly is at the heart of IAU’s theme 1, and arguably will remain the dominant thread in education policy worldwide. We must expand the attainment pool of postsecondary credentialed people not only as a proportion of population, but also in its scientific and technical expertise and its humanistic and civic habits of mind that nurture the mutual respect and cooperation so essential to addressing humanity’s grand challenges.

The attainment challenge is not only about scale and skills, but also about the interdependencies in and among its various dimensions, which are as complex as the interdependencies intrinsic to globalization and its challenges to humanity. Consider how the globalized economy sputters here and there and threatens havoc everywhere. Global warming continues apace, while the green economy wavers. Too many people suffer from the ravages of war, hunger, and other cruel injustices. Meanwhile, well-intentioned attempts by the U.N. and other organizations to advance and sustain social, economic, and environmental justice are too often stymied by the difficulty of balancing rights and responsibilities among the negotiating parties who are typically facing a tragedy of the commons in which special interests, intentionally or not, destroy or damage the value of a common good to the detriment of all of its economic beneficiaries.

Even the Internet/World Wide Web, an obvious common good that has spawned exponential growth in economic and social wealth, is not exempt from such contentious issues. A telecommunications giant, for example, might unilaterally attempt to favor the Internet traffic of its large customers to the detriment of other organizational and consumer traffic that flows through the Internet, thereby risking a tragedy of the Internet commons. The Internet Society was created to mitigate such risks, and has succeeded by governing open internetworking standards and the open processes used to advance them. This open, consensus-building governance model has protected the seminal democratic networking principle that all Internet traffic is created equal.

Likewise the core democratic principle that all people are created equal must become more personally actionable than ever in the form of affordable access to higher learning and quality-assured credentialing. We can't risk a tragedy of the learning and credentialing commons, because it is the joint public and private investment most likely to mitigate the challenges facing humanity. We need to focus on educational justice, if we are to make higher learning more affordable to the world's expanding economic demographic of low- and middle-income people. Meanwhile, public financial aid to students is shrinking in many parts of the world, while annual per-credential operating expenditures are not decreasing at most colleges and universities. The result is a three-way affordability conundrum: how to make credentialing processes more affordable to low- and middle-income students and also to the institutions and governments that support those students.

With the IAU’s three themes in mind, we summarize humanity’s challenges as follows:

The credentialing marketplace has become a common good – both a public and private good. It must be advanced and sustained as the delivery mechanism for educational justice and attainment at scale, which are essential to the advancement and sustainability of social, economic, and environmental justice. We must learn how to mitigate the risk of a tragedy of the credentialing commons while globally scaling up educational justice and attainment. Two Nobel Laureates in Economics and their work come to mind: Ronald Coase (1991 prize winner) and Elinor Ostrom (2009 prize winner who died in June, 2012).

Coase’s 1937 article, The Nature of the Firm, posited that “transaction costs” and the management friction they create accounted for the burgeoning size and overhead of the firms of the times. In our times, however, the Internet/Web has seriously diminished that friction and fueled globalization. Among the results are innovative, agile business models that rely on partnering and external sourcing to flatten overhead and bureaucracy, as illustrated by Thomas Friedman’s examples in his “flat-world” book. Traditional educational institutions, in contrast, continue to operate under financial models similar to the high overhead, bureaucratic, not so agile firms of the 20th century.

Elinor Ostrom’s prize-winning work on the “economic governance of the commons” raises intriguing possibilities for the economic governance of the credentialing commons. These possibilities deserve attention from both education’s internal economic beneficiaries and external investor beneficiaries – students, families, donors, governments, employers, and suppliers. In her focus on natural resource commons, Ostrom found that an open economic governance model designed to balance economic rights and responsibilities fairly among all economic beneficiary groups is the best bet for mitigating the risk of a tragedy of the commons. Neither government nor other special public or private interests should be favored over other economic beneficiary groups.

Open economic governance is already working outside of the domain of natural resources. The Internet Society described earlier is but one of many examples. Indeed, the Internet Society has been so successful that the Internet/Web continues to empower exponential growth in social and economic wealth – exactly what progressive policy leaders hope will result from scaling up educational justice and attainment. Perhaps the biggest barrier to scaling up attainment is the three-way affordability conundrum (see above), which is an economic issue directly related to educational justice. The economics of the current credentialing marketplace are working against scaling up educational justice and attainment.

Over the past two years, I have proposed and written about an open economic governance model for the credentialing marketplace. The model is described as the nonprofit, nongovernmental Education Leadership Commons in the already cited paper, "Is Education's Past Its 2050 Prologue?"

The paper includes ideas for how the ELC might be structured (along the lines of the successful Internet Society) to rebalance rights and responsibilities among credentialers and external investors in the credentialing marketplace – especially students and governments, among others. One such idea would have government commit to needs-tested financial aid (and/or a tax credit) in an amount projected annually from tax data, starting at birth. To remain eligible for such aid, a student would further have to submit at age 14 (or thereabouts), and periodically thereafter, to a constructivist, age-appropriate evaluation of basic communication fluencies and critical thinking skills – along the lines of OECD’s PISA and AHELO evaluations or other independent evaluations. Continuing eligibility would depend on re-submitting to an evaluation on schedule, but would not depend on any percentile ranking on the evaluation.

Any institution accepting a student’s financial aid would be obligated to report some to-be-determined universal high-level accountability metrics. For example, these two annualized ratios taken together could become an annual measure of credentialing productivity in peer groupings: 1) the ratio of credentials granted annually to annual unduplicated headcount, and 2) the ratio of annual operating expenses to credentials granted annually.

Government and other research centers would have access to the aggregated, privacy-secured data from the above protocols, and students would control their personal data (“my data”). The paper includes a matrix of rights and responsibilities that further illuminates the basic idea that earned, needs-tested financial aid and earned tax credits could be an economic lever for expanding and sustaining educational justice and educational attainment.

The paper also includes examples of how the ELC might be structured and openly operated to create a more open and agile credentialing marketplace.

Most nations expect the credentialing marketplace to be neither solely a private good nor solely a (universally free) public good. The former would leave educational justice unfulfilled and, thus, educational attainment goals unmet. The latter would be financially untenable in most nations, and would be questionable policy, even if affordable.

Those who doubt my policy comment above should reflect on Kris Kristofferson's lyric from the 1960s that "freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." With rights must come responsibilities, and vice versa. That's why credentialing's scalability and funding models must be harmonized, if educational justice and educational attainment are to proceed forward hand in hand to help meet humanity's major challenges.

May 23, 2012

I recently participated as a panelist in a live chat sponsored by The Guardian in the UK. We panelists interacted with each other and a larger audience to shed some light on what higher education needs from its leaders. Here's a link to the overall chat, and below are some of my summary comments about leadership, today and tomorrow, for higher education.

1) In 1920 H.G. Wells gave us an enduring framework for education as common good by warning that, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

2) Today's progressive policy leaders are honoring Well's warning by asking educators to scale up educational attainment: the proportion of (selected) adult populations holding a trusted, postsecondary credential (degree or certificate). For example, President Obama's attainment goal is to move the attainment needle from 40% to 60% in ten years.

3) Policy leaders, in essence, are equating attainment with the democratic principle of equal opportunity and expecting educational opportunitiesto become more open (affordably accessible) and to lead to increases in attainment proportions.

5) Economic demographic trends broadly imply that the proportion of low- and middle-income students in the education pipeline is increasing.

6) The economic demographic dimension of scaling up attainment exacerbates an already widespread three-way affordability conundrum: the need to lower the costs of attainment not only to low- and middle-class students, but also to the institutions and governments that support them. That's why "widening participation" is shorthand in the UK for what I'm calling here "scaling attainment."

7) Educational attainment priorities for higher education are increasingly boundary-crossing, collective (macro) goals that are not institutional (micro) in nature. Institutionally improving upon student-success metrics, such as various measures of persistence that include credentialing rates, is necessary to any increase in aggregate attainment proportions, but not sufficient. Credentialing rates a priori are not the same as attainment proportions!

8) Future leaders accordingly will need not only to be effective within current higher education service and organizational models, but also to have an achievable vision for leading the way across the boundaries that have traditionally demarcated various geopolitical and education sectors. New forms of collaboration and partnerships will accordingly be required.

9) Leadership experience, both inside the academy and outside the academy, can be useful, but no combination of such experiences will be sufficient to scale up, for example, national attainment proportions in large populations. Vision and a deeper understanding of the micro/macro challenges inherent in scaling up attainment are key necessities, along with the ability to attract internal and external collaborators to a more inclusively formulated vision of individual and collective success.

10) The globalized economy and its new enabling technologies interconnect everyone and everything. New forms of collaborative leadership will be required if purposeful economic governance mechanisms are to be developed in support of scaling up and sustaining educational attainment, while managing three-way affordability challenges for of all its stakeholders - educational institutions, students/families, governments, employers, and other sources of funding and support for education.

11) Unlike education, other sectors of the globalized economy have improved productivity with innovations and service redesigns enabled by technology. Education leaders will have to come to grips with this reality in order to create sustainable educational attainment models.

12) Traditional institutional leadership models and metrics of excellence, such as those practiced at Oxford, Harvard, and other universities, will persist and remain important. Education will set and maintain the pace in H.G. Wells' "race between education and catastrophe," however, only if new forms of leadership are focused on scaling attainment, affordability, and accountability. The levers of shared digital resources, communications, and collaborations are awaiting such leadership.

October 31, 2011

Mike Mathews (my colleague at SunGard Higher Education) has asked "What if Steve Jobs had been an educator." In his paper, Mike uses the now familiar applications based on the “Global Positioning System” (GPS) technology as a metaphor for imagining an “Educational Positioning System” (EPS) enabling a suite of integrated technologies and massively interconnected data that would help deliver many benefits that are easy to imagine in analogy to the GPS. I've been arguing that many of these same benefits would accrue to the"Education Leadership Commons" described in"Adaptive Leadership for the Completions Priority: Establishing an Education Leadership Commons." Mike, I, and others are working to create the ELC from an adaptive economic governance model to make the current completions marketplace more portable, transparent, productive, and mutually affordable and beneficial to education providers and their external investors, especially to their students. We want the completions marketplace to feature a rich set of apps and data based on a universally accessible Educational Positioning System.

July 15, 2011

I'm pleased to be providing leadership for starting up the Education Leadership Commons. The ELC is currently an embryonic movement dedicated to transforming education with the end-goal of enabling the scale-up of the proportion of the population holding "completions" (accredited postsecondary degrees and certificates). There's more, however. Simultaneous with scaling up the proportion of completions, investments in completions need to become mutually affordable both to education providers as expenses and to external investors in completions -- students/families, governments, donors, employers, and suppliers. In this context, my employer, SunGard Higher Education, is a "supplier" and is supporting the ELC start-up process. The intent of the start-up process, however, is to evolve the ELC into a nonprofit, non-governmental economic governance organization that does for completions what the Internet Society has done for the Internet by enabling exponential growth both in Internet traffic and in the creation of new economic and social wealth. Like the Internet, the completions production process is a common good and, like the Internet, should be economically governed to the mutual benefit of all economic beneficiaries. Not to do so is to risk a "tragedy of the commons" in which a common good is sacrificed to become, at best, primarily a government good or primarily a private good. At worst, humanity might lose the ongoing race between education and catastrophe (to paraphrase H. G. Well's distressing thought from the 1920s about the history of humanity).

Please peruse the Prospectus for a Global Education Leadership Commons, and post your comments here. The redesign of education is long overdue, and we must find find a win-win transformational strategy, rather than a strategy that keeps education providers and their external investors at unproductive odds.

The paper calls for new forms of collaboration at several levels, from collaboration between the CIO and other C-level officers on campus to economic-governance collaboration among education providers and education's "external investors" (students/families, governments, donors, employers, suppliers, etc.). The need for innovative forms of collaboration is fueled by the "elephant in education's room:" the "completions priority" and its multiple, complex co-dependencies, which are discussed in the paper. The paper also posits earned, need-based, promissory grants to students as the basis (in the U.S.) for restructuring Federal funding for higher education in order to provide leverage for a new economic governance collaboration at all sectors of the education marketplace and geopolitics.

By the way, I was on the EDUCAUSE Board when ECAR was created in the 1990s and am pleased to have now published my first paper under the aegis of ECAR. Membership in ECAR is by organizational subscription, and there are several options for subscribing.

October 09, 2010

My draft article, "Education's Priority Challenges," describes the "completions priority" and then uses it as the hook for outlining the priority challenges jointly facing education providers and education's external "investors" - students, families, donors, governments, employers, and suppliers. The article also offers a theoretical example of the kind of win-win collaboration that might be viably piloted in a local or national (governmental) context, or perhaps through the Red Ballon Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The theoretical "economic governance collaboration" described in the article draws on the research that made Professor Elinor Ostrom (Indiana University) a 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics.